Tuesday, May 04, 2010

Arresting the Times Square Would-Be Bomber

Great police work by the NPYD and FBI in nabbing the flea-brained would-be terrorist who planted the car bomb in Times Square Saturday night. While Drudge, Fox News, Pete King and other hysterics were near fainting from the terror-vapors, the cops did their job calmly and deliberately.

There was an interesting situation just before the guy was arrested on that Emirates flight to Dubai at JFK. The plane almost took off. See this, via Politico, via ABC News reporting on the ATC transmission on the very useful Web site LiveATC.net, which monitors live air-traffic control chatter.

On the other hand, let's not make too much of this being a "close call." Had the plane taken off, it certainly still would have been called back to Kennedy, and the pilots without question would have complied.

Bio

Joe Sharkey's work appears in major national and international publications. For 19 years until 2015 he was a weekly columnist for the New York Times. He is now a weekly travel and entertainment columnist with the global website Travel.Buzz, as well as an adjunct professor of journalism at the University of Arizona, He has written five books, four non-fiction and a novel, one of which is in development as a movie. Previously, he was an assistant national editor at the Wall Street Journal and a reporter and columnist with the Philadelphia Inquirer.
On Sept. 29, 2006, he was one of seven people on a business jet who survived a mid-air collision with a 737 over the Amazon. All 154 on the 737 died. His report on the crash appeared on the front page of the New York Times and later in the Sunday Times of London magazine.
He and his wife Nancy (who is a professor of journalism at the University of Arizona) live in Tucson with horses and parrots. He is working on a new novel about an international travel writer who hates to travel.
"JoeSharkey.com" is Copyright (c) 2006-2015 by Joe Sharkey.